A substation is evolving toward an intelligent substation and communication between intelligent electronic devices in the intelligent substation and related system requirements are defined in the IEC-61850 standard; and communication, configuration, management, supervision and the like of the devices in the intelligent substation has to comply with the IEC-61850 standard.
A configuration management method based upon the IEC-61850 standard is adopted for all the devices in the intelligent substation (other than an industrial Ethernet switch); and each Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) provides an IED Configuration Description (ICD) file, and a system configuration tool of the intelligent substation formulates system configuration of the entire substation from the ICD files, and the system configuration tool exports a configuration file of Configured IED Description (CID) of each IED device, where the configuration file needs to be downloaded to the IED device, thereby configuring the entire substation.
The industrial Ethernet switch provides a communication medium for the respective IED devices of the substation as well as a data management function, but is not required to provide the foregoing management method based upon the IEC-61850 standard; and an existing switch configuration scheme generally refers to a web page, command line (telnet or SSH-enabled) or SNMP scheme, and as compared with the other IED devices of the intelligent substation, this scheme suffers from complicated configuration and is troublesome and susceptible to a configuration error, particularly for a user without any experience in using the switch.
In the prior art, an implementation is to improve the configuration of the industrial Ethernet switch for the data management function using the GMRP protocol according to a subscriber and distributor model of the intelligent substation system but also has some apparent drawbacks: firstly each set of data is provided with a different MAC address so that there are a large number of multicast groups to be registered, for example, more than 200 for a substation at a normal size, and for such a large number of multicast groups, there is some risk in data management and also a high requirement on the switch; secondly the GMRP protocol is built over a VLAN which also needs to be configured, and an automatic configuration function can not be fully performed although the configuration of the VLAN may be alleviated with the (GARP Multicast Registration Protocol) GMRP; and thirdly the respective IED devices and the switches in all the networks are required to support the GMRP protocol, which may be difficult to realize.